Not your usual Design Books suggestion

Dear Data

It is this beautiful book written or rather sketched by two information designers Georgia and Stefanie about data visualization. The book is in the form of these postcards that the authors send out to each other with a visualization of a data they decided to track that week. so each week they jointly select one aspect of daily life and depict in the form these hand-drawn visualizations.

The beauty of the book is in the details. How it captures the non-linear nature of the human experience. How it’s always contradictory. Throughout the book, you will see this almost poetic display of visual metaphors. Each of the designers has this distinct style and they showcase it in their visualizations.

Its a must-have book in my opinion

Resonate

This is a book on visual storytelling and let me tell you one thing about it. It is good, really really good.

Nancy Duarte writes about the art of influencing an audience with storytelling. The book tells you about the fundamentals of laying out ideas to create a narrative. A few good things that I remember is how you should plan for the audience journey. For effective storytelling, you have to take them from one manner of doing to a new manner of doing something

You also need to acknowledge the sacrifice an audience has to make to adapt your narrative. Its a natural tendency of humans to resist your design and find errors in it. You should contemplate all the ways in your audience might resist and make sure you yourself address those concerns as a first step.

Sketching User Experience

This is in my opinion, a must-have book for all User Experience Designers. The book is primarily about techniques and process that uses sketching to put “experience” front and centre in our design process. One of the advantages of sketching is its ambiguous nature. If a sketch doesn’t specify everything, it tend to encourage various interpretations which can help the design process substantially.

One of the examples that stood out was using story-boarding for sketching the experience of using a product. The book also talks about using paper-based flipbook animations for defining interactions. Say you had to define how a user scales a rectangle in a graphics app that you are designing for. A paper flipbook style animation can really help here

Handbook of Usability Testing

Usability testing is really fascinating because it lets you see the design through the user’s eyes. They bring this unique value to the scene that no amount of discussion or debate would ever discover.The book starts out by talking about a really good example of user testing. A user on being prompted by the system to “Hit enter to default” replied, “I have never defaulted on anything before and I am not going to start now”.

The book talks about what usability testing is, when should you test for your product, How a test plan should be developed, what are the methods of testings, How do you find participants and much more.

For me, the most valuable part was about the skillsets required in the test moderator. The person overseeing the testing should be a people person and should be empathetic to the hurdles users face when they are performing the task.

Emotional Design

Emotional Design by Don Normal is, in my opinion, a wonderful take into observing how designers can create not only usable but also emotionally affecting products.

The book details out the 3 different aspects of design — the visceral level which concerns with the appearance of a product. the behavioural level which has to do with the effectiveness of using a product. Finally, the reflective level which concerns with the contemplative part of a design. Whether a design tells a story and connects with the personality of its user.

An example of this could be Instant messaging which may attract you on a visceral level by being this new form of communication where you use stickers, gifs, video and audio to deliver your message. On a behavioural level, it’s letting you communicate while you perform other tasks, its hidden from sight and is available when you need it. Finally, on a reflective level, it’s letting you stay connected with friends family no matter where you are. That short buzz is letting you know that someone “is there for you” at this very moment

I hope these suggestions proved useful to you. Keep learning, suggest some other good books that you know of.

I also made a video about the book suggestions as a part of a new Youtube Design Show that I launched called " The design discussion show"

Catch video and more episodes here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQKb-ZcscHA

Great design resource

100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People (Voices That Matter) Submitted May 05, 2018 at 08:15PM by borax12 https://ift.tt/2rkD2bA